What’s an Oscar Worth?

Did you watch the 85th Oscar award ceremony? It was a great event indeed with all the glitz and glamour.

Did you watch the 85th Oscar award ceremony? It was a great event indeed with all the glitz and glamour. What’s an Oscar worth? Each of the roughly 13-inch tall and 8 pound, 24-karat gold-plated statues is worth around $900 according to the current gold prices – If you could buy one.

If you ever won an Oscar statue, would you sell it off? I wouldn’t, not just Oscar but any other of the award medals I ever win either. It just doesn’t seem right. Awards aren’t worth just money, there’s a lot more to them: happy memories of heartwarming victories which no amount of bucks can ever pay for. But lots of Oscar winners have sold of their awards over the years. I wonder what drove them to? The priciest one ever sold was in 1999 to Michael Jackson. He paid more than $1.5 million for the 1939 Best Picture award given to the producers of “Gone with the Wind!”

Turns out that even if you did win an Oscar, you couldn’t sell it. Ever since 1950 the Oscar winners have had to sign a contract with the Academy which states that they will sell back their award to the Academy itself, if ever they wanted to get rid of it. This rule doesn’t apply to the trophies awarded until the 22nd Oscar ceremony.

Mike Krumboltz writes more about some of the Oscar statues that have been sold so far. Steven Spielberg, who has won 3 Oscars himself, spent a little over a million to purchase a Best Actor and a Best Actress trophy, and then ended up donating the statues back to the Academy.